Can nuclear waste teach us about long-term thinking?

Does our society have an addiction to short term thinking and planning? Is our failure to mitigate climate change a result of this?

Vincent Ialenti spent three years doing fieldwork in Finland, interviewing experts working on Posiva's Safety Case for the world's first long term nuclear repository, Onkalo.

His book about that fieldwork, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, explores the idea of "shallow" and "deep" time thinking. Dr. Ialenti uses Onkalo as a case study for how policy can involve ongoing work over decades, and look ahead towards potential impacts hundreds of thousands of years into the future - if expertise is as trusted and depoliticised as it is in Finland.

Bertie spoke to Vincent about the book, and how policymakers and the climate sector can think beyond the next generation or electoral cycle.

Dr. Vincent Ialenti is a Research Associate at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt’s Department of Environmental Studies. Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovski.

Further reading: 

• Buy Deep Time Reckoning from MIT Press here. 
• 'The Art of Pondering Earth’s Distant Future', Scientific American, 2021
• 'The benefits of 'deep time thinking'', BBC Future, 2023
• 'Temporality, fiction and climate – reading Mark Bould’s Anthropocene Unconscious', Land and Climate Review, 2022

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.